The Robert Rodriguez / James Cameron collaboration ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL wasn't a big hit at the domestic box office, where it made just under $86 million, but the movie got a much better reception in other countries, with the international box office adding $319 million to its total haul.
Although the movie made almost $405 million on a $170 million production budget, there has been no talk of a sequel. That's not very surprising, for a couple reasons. For one thing, that amount is less than what the 2017 version of THE MUMMY made on a smaller budget, and we saw how that movie blew up Universal's monster plans. For another, ALITA was released by 20th Century Fox, which has been absorbed by Disney in the months since the February release.
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL reached home video just over a week ago (you can pick up a copy of the DVD, Blu-ray, or 4K release HERE), and one person who is hoping it will do well enough to convince Disney to greenlight a sequel is actress Rosa Salazar, who played the cyborg title character wearing motion capture gear so her appearance could be altered.
Speaking with SlashFilm, Salazar said she's totally on board to return if ALITA becomes a long-running franchise.
I would play Alita ‘til my last breath. I would, and thanks to the performance capture technology, I probably could."
Salazar understands that it might be a while before there's movement on a sequel, as Fox and Disney
had a crazy merger. People are gaining jobs, people are losing jobs. The whole Disney/Fox acquisition is so involved, this isn’t the right time for me to call Alan Horn and be like, ‘Hey bro, I know you got a lotta stuff going on, but like what about ALITA 2?’"
In the meantime, she advises fans who want to see a sequel to "buy those Blu-rays."
Directed by Robert Rodriguez from a script by Laeta Kalogridis and producer James Cameron, ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL is a manga adaptation that is set several centures in the future. The story begins when
the abandoned Alita is found in the scrapyard of Iron City by Ido, a compassionate cyber-doctor who takes the unconscious cyborg Alita to his clinic. When Alita awakens, she has no memory of who she is, nor does she have any recognition of the world she finds herself in. As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious past.
Salazar's co-stars include Christoph Waltz as Ido; Keean Johnson as her street smart friend Hugo; Mahershala Ali, who plays two different characters, one of whom is Vector, who "runs and fixes matches in a gladiator-style combat game called Motorball"; Jennifer Connelly as one of the villains; Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as a friend to Hugo; Jackie Earle Haley, Ed Skrein, and Eiza González as villainous cyborgs; Leonard Wu as another cyborg; Lana Condor as an orphaned photographer; Marko Zaror as Motorball player Ajakutty; and Michelle Rodriguez as the cyborg Gelda.
I didn't manage to catch ALITA on the big screen, so I'll be watching it for the first time on home video.